Designing vSphere

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ESXi

If you do not set a root password, you will not be able to login to ESXi host using vSphere client. By default root password is blank.

When you enable lockdown mode, users cannot login to host directly using root account privileges. So if it is enabled, you have to create separate account with admin privileges.

By default ESXi host is assigned DHCP IP address. To change it to static ipaddress, you can use either direct console user interface(DCUI) or vSphere client. From direct console select “configure management network” where you can change IP,Subnet mask,Gateway, DNS and DNS Suffix. You can also change the NIC,configure VLAN, use IPv6. IPv6 is disabled by default, to enable it, reboot is needed.

You can also restart management network, test management network and disable management network from the console. Test management network will attempt to ping your default gateway, DNS Server and resolve host names.Also DCUI allows you to change keyboard layout,view system logs and view support information. You can change keyboard layout to German,Russian,French and Japanese. You can also reset system configuration and remove extensions from the console.

Hardware Requirements for ESXi

Processor –64 bit (Opteron or Intel(Xeon,Nehalem)

RAM minimum 2GB

one or more 1 GB Nic or 10 GBnic

SATA,SCSI,SAS controller

Disk space around 5GB

ESXi creates 3 partition by default

1.diagnostic partition

2. swap partition also called as VFAT scratch partition

3. VMFS partition

ESXi creates VFAT scratch partition of 4GB and diagnostic partition 110GB only on disk from which it is booting. If there is any free space left, VMFS partition is created. VMFS partition is created only if disk is blank.